Broken schooling will keep SA down

The most successful countries in the world have not only invested time and money in education, they have inculcated a deep respect for learning and, even more importantly, for teachers.

In this country, our various provincial and national education departments regularly pat themselves on the backs for a job well done.

Yet, when our pupils are measured against international benchmarks and even against other developing world countries, they come up woefully short.

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Because of the way the system is rigged to show misleading matric pass rates, hundreds of thousands of young kids are abandoned because they are bulleted from schools at regular intervals so only the strongest academically progress on to matric.

Skills crisis

All the while, our top ministers in their designer suits are proclaiming the wonders of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and how South Africa is going to be one of the leaders in that tsunami of technological change.

How is that going to happen when our general standards of mathematics and science literacy and skill are below those of other countries?

Why would new tech investors come here if they won’t be able to find skilled and knowledgeable people?

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Unequal education perpetuates poverty and inequality

Science education expert Kathryn Kure writes for us today that broken and unequal education perpetuates poverty and inequality.

She says the focus should be on supporting and upskilling our teachers, many of whom are teaching “out of the field” – either in subjects or grade levels for which they were not trained.

One of the biggest impediments to training teachers is that material is not readily available because of our copyright laws, which means it has to be bought – something many poor schools cannot afford.

This needs to be addressed by the education authorities because these rules are constricting the flow of knowledge … and, effectively, they are robbing many young people of their dreams.

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